A record of travels, science, projects and anything else that strikes my fancy

Friday, December 4, 2009

Will it snow...or won't it

It has finally gotten properly good and cold here in the NW. We have our first arctic blast. Temperatures at night have been handily below freezing with temperatures around 40 for the high during the day. While it certainly isn't the negative temperatures of the Northeast or Canada or Alaska, for those of us who have lived in Florida for the past six years this is plenty cold. Especially when you are a bicycle commuter.

What has been really entertaining has been the weather forecasts. See, this type of front is very similar to the one last year. The one that led to HUGE snowfall for Seattle, and handily shut down the city. For the Northwest, this was epic snow. In the 20 years my family has been in the NW we have never had that much snow. Which is why the freak out was a little over the top. Really when that kind of snow is a 50 year event, people should just relax, and go with the flow. There is no reason for the city to invest in a gazillion new snow plows, which won't get used at all until the next 50 year event.

Back to the current weather reporting. Forecasters (other than NWS) have been actively avoiding the word snow. No one want's to be the one to say, look, it might snow. Partly this is because the precipitation probabilities are actually really low, this air mass is cold, but dry. But I can't help but think that if this had been a different year, many of the local stations would have been trumpeting the possibility of snow. We would have had "SNOW WATCH 2009" with epic music and a nifty graphic, even though the chances of precipitation are low. Last years weather burn instead has everyone trying to outdo one another with how dry the forecast is. So now what will happen if it does snow I wonder....